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Corengi: Clinical Trial Search Engine for Type II Diabetes |
 From LocalHealthGuide: An online matching service, Corengi (Corengi stands for “Clinical Options Research Engine”), that helps patients with type II diabetes find research studies they might want to participate in through finding the clinical trials that match their medical profile and organizes the results on the member’s personal webpage. Many of those patients, whether in the hope of gaining access to new treatments or simply to help advance research, want to join a clinical trial, but sometimes finding the right one is not that easy. The government maintains a clinical trial listing online, but the site is so complicated and jargon-filled that patients often find it’s “unusable.”
People who want to use Corengi’s service first sign up and answer about twenty questions about their health, such as their age, weight, date of diagnosis, most recent hemoglobin A1c levels (a indicator of blood sugar control), whether they are on insulin or oral medications, and whether they have other conditions such as heart disease, hypertension or high cholesterol.The site updates its database every day and sends members email notices when new trials become available that match their profiles. Members may also soon have the have the option to share information with other members, but that feature is still in the works.
The service is free for patients, but pharmaceutical companies and others conducting research will pay Corengi to gain access to the patient’s information in an anonymized form from which the patient’s identity has been stripped out. Subscribing drug companies and researchers will also be able to send notices and messages to website’s members with Corengi acting as the go-between so that the members identities are protected.
Initially, Corengi will focus on type II diabetes, but the site could serve as a template for sites that focus on other common conditions, such as Alzheimer’s in future. In the meantime, similar clinical research matching services are popping up online. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, JDRF, started a service called Clinical Connection in 2009 to link Type I patients with research. Other commercial competitors include New York-based TrialX and Miami, FL-based ClinicalConnection. |
